


Run If You Stole a Shard of Sunlight

by ViaLethe



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Soulmates, The Problem of Susan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-22
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-07-08 09:44:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15927857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViaLethe/pseuds/ViaLethe
Summary: “He will bring you grief,” Aslan says, on a long sighing note.“Jon brings me joy,” Susan counters.“Yes. It is always so, at the start of things. But joy does not last forever."





	Run If You Stole a Shard of Sunlight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Snacky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snacky/gifts).



**_In Narnia_ **

In Narnia she meets him first in the deserts of Calormen, striding through the sands like a mirage, all grey eyes and pale skin under the black of his turban.

A bastard, Aravis whispers to her that night, in their encampment among the dunes. The product of an affair between a girl of a Northern family (Narnian, Susan suspects, fled south in the time of the Witch, the sands a scorching refuge from an endless winter) and a high Calormeme noble.

“Now he wanders,” Aravis says, and shrugs, as her people do, as if this is a thing of no consequence, simply how the world is. Perhaps she is right. “One of a brotherhood who goes where others will not, who protect the deserts and those unwary enough to travel through them.”

She watches him stalk closer, something in his movements reminding her of the more predatory faction of her guard, watches him remove first his gloves and then his turban, raking his hands through curls dark as the night, and shivers, despite the sand’s heat still pulsing deep in her bones.

“An outcast,” Susan says, louder than she meant, for he locks eyes with her and smiles, just the barest touch.

“No, my lady,” he says, voice pitched low but meant to carry. “Merely a man of purpose. I make my own choices.”

That night, in the sandstorm that envelops their camp, winds shrieking with a terrible violence, she gropes her way to his tent, heavily veiled from the stinging sands.

She hardly knows what has made her so bold - the winds, the chill of the desert night and the heat of its day banked inside her, the freedom of being far from home, far from her throne and her duty and the constant weight of responsibility - and yet here she stands, breathless, lifting the veil from her eyes.

“Your grace?” he says, soft, unmoving; as a hunter barely breathes when sighting their prey. _Or as the prey barely breathes when they know they’ve been made_ , Susan thinks, heart fluttering in her ears.

“Choose me,” she says, not knowing herself whether it’s a request or a command. “Choose me,” she tries again, softer this time, and his motion is swift and smooth, catching her body up against his almost before she realizes she’s been caught.

By the time the sands abate, days later, the entire party is aware of where the Queen has spent her time.

“Rabadash will take it as an insult,” Aravis says, the dark slash of her brows drawn together. “He will not dare move against you, of course, but to take a bastard countryman of his as your lover after rejecting him - Calormen will be no friend to Narnia so long as Jon Snow lives in your bed. Still though,” she says, glancing at Susan (who has managed to flush only slightly at that last bit), “I remain your ally, and your friend. And he is very handsome.”

“The whole world will take it as an insult,” Edmund says (and how glad she is that he’s with her on this trip, rather than Peter; Edmund who merely blinked at her when she emerged at last, tousled and dreamy eyed, and asked if she had enjoyed herself, as opposed to Peter, who would likely have knocked the tent down the very first night with his bare hands, if need be). “The most desirable woman in the world chooses a nobody - of course they’ll howl and complain and gossip.” He shrugs then, and grins at her, that old cheeky smile. “But let them. They’ve done worse enough in their time. As long as you’re sure, Su.”

“It isn’t about being sure,” she says, searching for words, trying to make the impossible understood. “It’s something about him - I have to, Edmund. As if I’m meant to.”

He looks at her steadily, and she wonders what he sees - a madwoman lost to the heat, a foolish sister who has mistaken men before, or his trusted partner in crime - and then he laughs, short and sharp, and she knows all is well. “Maybe there is magic in these blasted sands,” he says. “Very well then, he’s ours.”

On the third night, Aslan comes, the great grey shadow of a cat pacing the sands, reflected moonlight from the sand bleaching his fur to bone; and she knows, if she had not before, that whatever will has driven her to Jon, it is not his.

“He is not of this world, my child,” Aslan says, in that steady, inexorable ways of his - not cruel, never cruel, but solid, unyielding as stone. “He cannot belong to you, nor you to him. His gods are apart from me, and he will never be Narnian.”

 _I don’t care_ , Susan thinks, fists balled into her skirts, but that is not a thing to be said to Aslan.

Of course, the Lion doesn’t need words to be spoken to hear them. “He will bring you grief,” he says, on a long sighing note.

“He has brought me joy,” she counters.

“Yes. It is always so, at the start of things. But joy does not last forever,” he says, and rubs his great golden face against hers, claiming her as his own like the biggest, softest housecat she has ever known, before he fades, and is gone.

He brings her none of grieving in the years after - Peter grows to trust him, Lucy adores him (“Though he might brood a little less, don’t you think?” she teases, against Susan’s constant protests that _That is simply the way his face is built, thank you very much_ ), and his connection to the Narnians - especially those of the animalistic variety - rivals their own.

But she brings it to him, she knows. On the day they chase the stag, he follows along, her faithful partner in all things, until his horse comes up lame and he waves her on with her siblings, laughing at his own misfortune.

“You know what I would wish for in any case,” he says. “Go on, I’ll find you.”

And then she is in England, and a child once more, and her life is ended.

 

**_In Westeros_ **

In Westeros she meets him with her horn in his hand, her Jon and yet not, for this is a different world, a different time, a different man.

This man is brooding in truth, quiet and careful, serious to a fault - but still _hers_ , she finds, still Jon. She can see it in the uncertain set of his mouth when he speaks (“You’re not exactly what I was expecting”), in the way the corners of his eyes crinkle when he smiles (“What were you expecting?” she says. “Well...something that could bring down a dragon, I suppose,” he answers, and smiles at her reply of, “Then I’ll just have to find a way for you”).

It’s there in the huge white wolf who paces to her side and noses at her hand, too. “He reminds me of someone I used to know,” she says, kneeling in the snow so her head is level with the wolf’s, getting a warm lick to the cheek for her trouble. “Perhaps he remembers me.”

It’s there too in Jon’s bed that night; the scar over his heart is new, but the feel of his hands on her body is the same after all this time, and if she whispers _I missed you_ in frenzied repetition as she comes, he doesn’t seem to mind.

Perhaps he’s seen stranger things, this colder, darker Jon of hers.

There are indeed dragons in the sky over his home of Winterfell, and a frost-pale queen in the winter snows - but she is on the side of good, Jon tells her, and his aunt besides.

And he has siblings too, here in this world where she is one and he is one of many. Sansa - a gentle, beautiful lady hardened and hollowed by abuse and fear, Arya - a valiant little thing possessed of a cold, deadly rage, and Bran - a prophet, a crippled spymaster living through the secrets of others. When Jon tells her of their dead brother Robb, his brief kingly glory and his ultimate betrayal, she shudders, and cries for him, and for what her family might have become, in a different place.

When she asks, hesitantly, of lions, Jon only scoffs. “There’s only two of them left,” he says, gesturing towards the far end of the hall, “yet they still manage to act as if they own the world.” (Sansa introduces her to the Lannister brothers, and while Jaime is as beautiful as Aslan and Tyrion as clever, they are certainly not her sort of lion, and for that, she is grateful.)

He takes her one night to the Weirwood grove at the heart of Winterfell and slides with her into the hot springs nearby while he tells her of the Old Gods and the heart trees scattered across the realm, the persistence of the old beliefs and their refusal to die out among his people.

“We never let go,” he says. “You can say that about the Starks, at least.”

Susan says nothing, and watches the tree, with its face staring blankly back at her, bleeding down into the dirt like a dire omen.

The battle comes soon enough, of course, the halls of Winterfull ablaze with icy dragonfire, the dead pouring down from the north.

It is her obsidian-tipped arrow that finds the Great Other, high on his stolen dragon above the field, and some detached corner of her mind marvels that the horn knew what it was about after all.

“That was brilliant,” Jon says, kissing her so hard her lips tingle, as vast swathes of the army of the dead crumble away to dust.

And then the world seems to slow, but not enough; just enough that Susan _sees_ the rotting giant heave his broken body into the wall far, far below them, _sees_ Jon stumble as the wall shudders and cracks beneath them; _sees_ Daenerys sweep by on Drogon fractions of an inch too late, the hot, leathery smell of him sweeping over her; sees Jon fall, and fall, and fall.

“How many times,” she says tightly, not allowing herself to think, to feel, in this frozen moment, where Dany’s horrified eyes meet hers, sightless, where Ghost’s endless howl stops her heart. “How many times do you intend to torture me this way?” she asks, and turns, already knowing who will be there.

“Daughter,” Aslan says, shining, blazing golden bright and beautiful against this backdrop of things that are _wrong_ , “do you understand now? Some laws even I cannot change.”

 _They hunt lions here_ , she thinks, and turns, and runs, and throws herself over the edge to follow him.

She’s uncertain, in that last moment, whether the rushing in her ears sounds more of a growl or purr.

 

**_In Europe_ **

In Europe, when she sees him, she flees.

She knows better now, she thinks; and besides, the middle of this hellish war is hardly the place to think of her worlds-spanning doomed romance. An intelligence agent must be practical, especially one as young and unproven as she.

Still, she watches him, something in her twisting painfully at the sight of his face, so odd to her without a beard, so smooth and so very, very young.

Now she is the one more bitter, colder, darker; wearing her lipstick like a flame, a defiant cry. When dying soldiers hold her hand and ask if she believes in God, she tells them it doesn’t matter, and almost believes it.

It doesn’t, for he finds her anyhow, somehow managing to always be the one who delivers papers to the makeshift office where she works, who maneuvers himself into position as aide to the general she’s tasked with reporting to, who finds her at the little bars in town where the men’s feverish gaiety hides a darker undertone.

“I feel as though you’re stalking me,” she says, the third time he finds her there, turning away so she doesn’t have to look at his face, doesn’t have to look at the way his short hair waves at the ends, trying desperately to curl.

“Maybe I am,” he says, “but my father always said you can’t get yourself anywhere if you don’t try.”

“You’re too young for me.” This even though she can’t remember how old she really is, or how old she seems to other people, here in this world that used to be hers.

“I’m older than I look,” he says, and shifts, fingers brushing against hers so that she shivers with the contact, closes her eyes against it. “I know you, Susan. And you know me.”

 _She does_ , she realizes, when she opens her eyes. This is her Jon, through and through; Jon in a boy’s body, just as she’s stuck in this coltish girl’s, but her Jon still.

***

“He’ll find out,” she says, later that night, into the darkness that surrounds them. “If we’re together, he’ll know it.”

“Who?”

“God,” she says. “Fate. It doesn’t matter. We’re not meant to exist in the same place, I think.”

“Then why does it keep happening?”

For that, she has no answer, and she’s heartsick and distracted all the next week, anxiety eating at her until she feels claws pricking at her skin and hot breath at her neck, chasing her down.

When the orders come and the battle commences, she’s unsurprised; just refuses evacuation with the other girls in a dull haze, and slips in with the nurses, running bandages and medicines in the makeshift field hospital that was once a cathedral.

It’s outside the doors that she finds him, covered in the blood of one of his fellows, shocked and dulled but still there, still alive.

It’s as she’s reaching for him that the golden glow seeps across her vision, and a roar fills her ears, and she screams into it, into the face of the lion because it isn’t _fair_ , it isn’t _right_ \- and then the screaming resolves itself into a shell, landing between them and she has only time to look up and say “ _I’ll find you_ ,” though she knows he can’t possibly hear-

 

**_In Aslan’s Country_ **

In Aslan’s Country, when she wakes, he is not there.

There is only her, and the great cat, and the endless sky full of stars.

“Susan,” he says, in a low rumbling purr. “Are you ready to come home now?”

She looks at him and wants to laugh; the time for screaming is done, there can be no anger here, no rage, no injustice. “What is home for me?” she says instead, simply. “How can I know, when I’ve been ripped apart so often I ache with it?”

Aslan watches her; calm, steady, a great golden rock, marble covered in fur. He is, as ever, inscrutable to her. Lucy would have understood innately, Edmund would have guessed, Peter would never even need to be told. Even Jon, she thinks, could have read the lion that rules her life better than she can.

But she can read herself.

“The only constant has been him, across all the years, all the lives. If I’m to be given a choice, I would choose him, every time.”

“As you always have,” he says, and paces closer, until she can feel his breath on her face. “I warned you he would bring you grief, and so it was. I watched you suffer, and yet you endured.” He tilts his great head to the side and considers her, amber eyes slowly blinking. “I cannot control all things, dear heart. He is not mine, so I could not bring him here, even if I tried. He belongs to other gods.”

Though rage does not come here, in this country where all is still and calm and at peace, Susan finds sadness does, a deep well of it spilling over into the hollows inside her where before there had been Jon.

“But you can,” Aslan says, and nuzzles her face to catch the tears before they could spill. “One god cannot steal followers from another, but souls are free to choose who they would follow.” He shakes his head, just slightly, his mane a golden halo around him, and two tiny rings tinkle to the ground. “Your brothers brought these when they arrived,” he says, as she picks them from the grass. “They will take you between worlds, until you choose to return, alone or otherwise.”

Her keys to Jon don’t look like much, there in her palm; simple bands set with yellow and green stones, but to Susan they are all and everything.

“Go with my blessing,” Aslan says, “and fulfill your vow.”

“I will,” she says, and slips on the yellow ring, and vanishes.

***

She finds him, in time, through a blood red pool bordered in white; her Jon, the Jon of Narnia, with his back to a weirwood tree and Ghost at his side.

“Choose me,” she says, and he smiles, and does.


End file.
